When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel

by Paula McLain

  If he only knew how little I do need. How much.

  Off the living room, the dim bathroom has a closet-sized shower with a cheap frosted-glass door. The single bedroom seems to be an addition. When I step inside, the threshold gives like a sponge, but the room itself feels solid enough, with a metal-framed double bed and a simple bureau with a lamp. A picture window on the south-facing wall looks out onto thick forest etched against the fading light. The gloaming, Eden always called this time of day, a strange term that meant “to glow,” even as it referred to the dark.

  “It can get pretty cold at night,” Kirk says. “I’d keep a fire going when you’re here. You can use as much wood as you like as long as you chop more. That heater hogs propane.” He shrugs at the standing unit against the wall. “Anything you use, you refill from town.”

  “That’s fine,” I assure him, only wanting to be alone now.

  But there’s more. The shower has tricky taps, with the hot and cold knobs reversed. The flue on the woodstove needs coaxing now and again. He shows me how to use the generator if the power cuts out, which it will sometimes, he warns.

  “The loggers cut the lines. I think they’re drunk more than not. The way they drive these roads you’ll want to watch for them. And keep everything locked up too, at night. A woman on her own, I mean….” His voice trails and dips as if he’s just heard himself cross an invisible line into the realm of the personal.

  “I’ll be all right.” Annoyance has crept into my voice.

  Kirk coughs awkwardly. “Course you will.”

  * * *

  —

  When he finally leaves, the cabin ticks with quiet. I unpack my few things and then step out onto the porch, into cool dusk, purple light. The spaces between the trees have contracted. I breathe in the stillness and for one precarious moment let myself think of the life I’ve just swung away from, not by choice, of Brendan and our messy kitchen, toys everywhere, baby tub upended in the sink. Our names side by side on the mailbox, like a talisman that had failed in its purpose. We had seven years together—not nearly enough—but he was right to say I haven’t been there for him. I haven’t.

  Above me, I look for the moon in the ragged gaps in the canopy, but can’t find it. A screech owl sends up a trembling rhythm of hoots in the distance. From farther off a dog begins to yip, sounding plaintive. Or is it a coyote? The temperature has plunged. I shiver in my flannel shirt and jacket, wondering how cold it might get before morning, and whether the girl has a blanket or a fire wherever she is.

  The girl.

  I have no idea where the thought has come from, but immediately try to push it away. My whole world is still smoking behind me because of girls like Cameron Curtis. The missing and the damaged, their stories pulling at me like jagged little siren songs. For the last few years, I’ve been working for an initiative in the Bay Area called Project Searchlight, focusing on sex crimes and crimes against children, those abducted and murdered by strangers, or stolen and rendered powerless by their own family members, or targeted by pimps and monsters, sold and resold invisibly.

  It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done, and also the most important, even if Brendan can’t ever forgive me. I’m good at it, too. Over time, I’ve developed a kind of radar for victims, and Cameron Curtis is deeply familiar, almost as if a neon sign flashes over her head, telegraphing her story, her vulnerability. And not just to me. However the sign has gotten there, I know predators can see it too, luridly bright and unmistakable.

  I think of the girl’s family, losing their minds with worry and dread. I think of how lonely and lost Cameron might have felt for years, desperate even—disconnected. How sadness and shame are more than feelings; they’re an illness, a terrible cancer that spins through the world taking lives in a hidden cyclical way that might never end.

  When the yipping comes again, I flinch. It’s definitely a coyote. More than any other animal in these woods, they sound almost human—cold and lonely and hungry. Scared, even. Crying on and on.

  (five)

  That night I float bodiless above a white crescent of beach as someone stumbles, running through tangled kelp and shadows. But there’s nowhere to go. It’s a girl, of course. She trips and falls to her knees, stands and falls again, scrambling backward on her hands, screaming and shaking. And then she quiets suddenly. Quiets the way an animal finally does, when it knows the chase is over.

  I wake with a start, my heart thudding, and my skin slick with sweat. My fever must be back, I think, throwing off the scratchy blankets. Under my thick sweater my breasts are still bound in their tourniquet, but the swelling hasn’t gone down at all. My pain is dull but constant, a throbbing anchor point.

  All around me, the dark is ice cold and seems to pool. I’ve forgotten how it feels to sleep in the woods, utterly isolated without street noise or neighbors, or light. Shoving my feet into a second pair of socks, I step out into the main room, where the blinking microwave tells me it’s not quite 4:00 a.m. I’ve slept for five hours, maybe. Passed out is more like it.

  I find some ibuprofen and another sleeping pill, and swallow them down with whiskey, hoping to clear my head of the nightmare. I can only assume the girl was Cameron Curtis, my subconscious fabricating a version of her disappearance, caught up in the drama that’s always preoccupied me, long before I became a detective, even. As if cries for help that are forever ringing through the atmosphere get amplified as they cross my path, and sticky. As though they belong to me somehow, and I have no say in the matter, no choice at all but to try and answer them.

  * * *

  —

  The first thing I see when I wake several hours later is the half-empty liquor bottle on the floor beside the sofa, my socks balled up on the coffee table. Behind my eyes, my hangover pulses, spangled. If Hap were here, he’d be concerned to see me drinking so much. He’d also be dressed already, face washed, coffee on the boil. He loved mornings and late nights, too. Sometimes I wondered if he slept at all, but it was comforting to think he was always there if I needed him, awake and at the ready. I wish that were still true.

  I dress in layers, feeling the top button of my jeans sinking into the soft flesh at my waist, my fingertips grazing the puckered skin, like fresh scar tissue. I pull my hair back without checking my reflection and then fill my thermos with coffee before bolting the cabin door behind me and heading back toward the village.

  When I reach the coast road, I turn the car north toward Caspar and Jug Handle Creek, a favorite place of Hap’s for day hikes. When I was eleven, Hap and many of the rangers he worked with joined up with local activists to protect the bluffs from logging and real estate development—and they won. A legacy the entire area was proud of. Hap was only twenty when he first started working for the U.S. Forest Service, rising through the ranks until he became lead warden not long after I came to live with them, with oversight over dozens of rangers and fifty thousand acres of federally owned land.

  His was a big job and sometimes a dangerous one. The stories he told were full of hunting accidents and hikers in dire straits, of teenagers pulled blue and lifeless from hidden quarries. He knew what an aggressive black bear could do to a man, and what men could do to one another out in that boundlessness.

  Over the eight years I lived in Mendocino with the Straters, I became Hap’s student and sidekick, his shadow. At first I didn’t understand why he would want to spend so much time with me, or why he and Eden had taken me on to begin with. I’d already bounced through half a dozen homes without sticking. Why would this be different? It took time and numerous false starts for me to believe that Hap and Eden were what they appeared to be on the surface, just decent people who meant to be kind because they could. I tested and pushed, trying to goad them into sending me away like everyone else had. Once I ran off and slept in the woods, waiting to see if Hap would come and look for me. When he did, I thought he’d be angry or
fed up with my nonsense, but he wasn’t. He only looked at me, damp and bedraggled, shivering from my night on the ground.

  Walking me back to his truck, he said, “If you’re going to be out here on your own, let’s get you smart about it, so you can take care of yourself.”

  “I can take care of myself already,” I said, putting up my guard automatically.

  “Things have been hard on you. I know that. You’ve had to be tough to get through it, but toughness isn’t the same as strength, Anna.”

  It was as if he had shined a light directly into my eyes, into the crevice in my heart I thought I’d hidden better. “What do you mean?”

  We’d reached the truck and climbed in. He settled himself behind the wheel, seeming in no hurry to answer my question. Finally he turned to me and said, “Linda told us what happened to your mom, honey.”

  Linda was Mrs. Stephens, my social worker. All I could do now was pretend I didn’t care what he knew or didn’t, what he thought of me or didn’t. “So?”

  “I can’t even imagine what that must have been like for a kid your age. Honestly. It breaks my heart.”

  Whatever thoughts were in my head vanished with a forced pop. On autopilot, I inched nearer to the door handle.

  Hap noticed and grew very still. Only his eyes seemed to move and they saw everything. “I won’t stop you if you want to run away, but if you could take a chance on us and stay, I can teach you things that might help you later. Things that have helped me. About being in the woods.”

  Keeping my eyes on the front windshield, the scrim of dust above the wiper blades, I shrugged to let him know he didn’t have my full attention.

  “Nature demands our respect, Anna. It has a brutal side for sure, but if you can learn its language, there’s peace to be found, and comfort too. The best kind of medicine I know.”

  “I’m fine the way I am.” I faced him, daring him to say otherwise.

  “Of course you are. How about one lesson before we head home, though? I can teach you how to find true north. An easy one.”

  I wanted to say yes, but the word had gotten stuck a long time ago, caught and fixed like a marble in the middle of my throat. Instead, I pulled my hand away from the door and into my lap.

  “Or later is fine,” he said. “It can keep. Let’s go home.”

  That night before bed, he gave me a clothbound book called Basic Wilderness Survival. I pushed it into a drawer in my nightstand, but took it out again as soon as he left the room, scanning the chapter titles. “Signaling.” “Sustenance.” “Shelter.” “Knots and Lashes.” I stayed up past midnight devouring it. There were step-by-step instructions for testing the edibility of plants and bugs, setting traplines, building hobo shelters, catching fish with your hands. There was map and compass nomenclature to learn, field bearings and terrain considerations, fire building, personal protection, wound care, adaptability, overcoming stress and hypothermia and fear.

  I didn’t understand why I was drawn to these scenarios, at least not then, but they spoke to me on the deepest level. Hap was a wise man. He must have guessed from the beginning that this would be the way to talk to me, survivor to survivor.

  * * *

  —

  Pulling into the small lot at the head of the trail, I double tie my heavy boots, zip up my anorak to my chin, and head off, skirting the main trailhead to follow a lesser-known route out to the headlands loop. Half a mile in, I come to a dense cypress grove and duck through a narrow break in the trees, holding one hand in front of my face to catch the cobwebs I know are there, though I can’t see them. My fingertips are still sticky with the strands as I press inside, and then time is sticky, too. I’m ten or eleven, being shown the secret way into the grove for the first time.

  “Krummholz” is the word for this kind of vegetation I remember from one of Hap’s lessons, a German term that means “bent wood.” Over many decades, hard weather has sculpted the trees into grotesque shapes. The salt-rich north wind kills the tips of the branches, forcing them to dip and twist, swooping toward the ground instead of the sky. They’re a living diagram of adaptation, of nature’s intelligence and resilience. They shouldn’t be able to keep growing this way, and yet they do.

  In the grove, I feel a sudden, sharp ache for Hap. For all the loveliness he showed me, and the ugliness, too. For how he peeled back the world, over and over, trusting me to let it in. Being here makes me feel closer to him, and that much closer to the answers I’ve come for, the way I might put myself back together like a scattered, shattered jigsaw puzzle.

  I close my eyes, trying to hold it all still—the spare sifting light, and the dense smell of moss. But the moment I do, a thought springs up as if on a blackened movie screen. A flash of afterimage, quick and dark. This is a perfect place to bury a body.

  Cameron Curtis rushes to the surface of my mind, like heat. Like the blood tingling through my hands as I clench them. The wide brown eyes that have known difficult things. The stubbornly hopeful set of her mouth, and her long dark hair. It doesn’t seem to matter that I’ve failed others like her and myself along the way. That it’s probably too late already. She’s here.

  I’m almost stumbling as I duck back through the break and onto the headlands, walking faster and faster along the empty trail, to the edge of the bluff where the wind is so strong it almost knocks me sideways. Down below, four oily cormorants stud a ragged black rock, their necks tucked back against their bodies like hooks. The surf bucks around them, hurling foam. Farther out, there are black swells and green swells. A fishing boat rolls to the top of a crest, and then drops away, as if through a trapdoor.

  I want Cameron Curtis gone like that, out of my consciousness for good. But not even the boat disappears. It springs out of the trough, small and white, clinging there. My ears have started to ring with cold, but I sit down anyway, cradling my knees tightly with my arms, holding myself together. My hair blows over my eyes and into my mouth, tasting of brine. Everything seems to swirl in a vortex, yanked back and forth, awful and beautiful. And I’m here with it, trying to remember how to live through unthinkable moments, how to ride out the wildness and the chaos and the fear.

  (six)

  An hour or so later, as I make my way back to my car, I’m chilled to the bone but calmer in my head. As soon as I reach the parking lot, I stop in my tracks. Two striped police barriers half block the park entrance. Half a dozen uniformed officers are organizing near the rangers’ board, with K-9 teams and walkies. This is a search party for Cameron Curtis.

  Tightening the hood of my anorak, I make for my Bronco, feeling conspicuous, on high alert. I’m ten feet away with my keys in my hand when I hear my name. But I have to be imagining it. No one knows me here, not anymore. Speeding up, I reach the door just as a hand comes down on my back.

  “Hey.”

  I whirl with my hands out automatically, ready for a confrontation. But nothing can prepare me for the face I see—so familiar, even with the intervening years. It’s like swimming through vertigo, or waking up in a time machine.

  “Anna Hart. I can’t believe it.”

  I can only stare at him. Gray eyes, lined now but with the same light; his square jaw, and fine straight nose; the fringe of unruly red-gold hair bristling from under the brim of his hat. He’s a phantom, a memory, a forever-ago friend. “Will Flood.”

  I go to hug him and bang my elbow against his shoulder, then back away, stepping on his foot.

  “Ow!” He laughs. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  I can’t think fast enough to answer him. The last time I saw Will, I was eighteen and he was twenty-two, newly in uniform in the sheriff’s office his father had run seamlessly for decades. Back then Will had big dreams, often talking of San Francisco, LA, Denver, Seattle, anywhere but in Ellis Flood’s long shadow.

  “What’s going on here?” I ask, as if it isn’t ob
vious.

  “Missing girl. Two days now. Disappeared from her home in the middle of the night, no signs of forced entry.”

  “She a runaway?”

  “Don’t think so. Mom’s Emily Hague.”

  “Emily Hague the actress?” I can hardly believe it. A movie star in Mendocino?

  “What are the odds this falls on me? Family wants it all to stay out of the media. Dad tried to give me ten thousand dollars under the table to speed up the search. As if that works. Wave some money and the girl appears out of a hat.”

  “I hope you took it.”

  His laugh comes fast. “Listen, have a drink with me later.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Like hell you can’t. Patterson’s at eight or I’ll come looking for you.”

  I feel another spasm of vertigo and I wish I could blink and disappear. Be faraway and invisible. But this is Will. “I’ll try.”

  “You’ll be there.” Then he’s striding away toward the assembled team, giving orders as he goes.

  * * *

  —

  I climb into my Bronco and start the engine as the team plunges out onto the main trail. I know it by heart, and the tough work that lies ahead for them, too. They’ll be making a grid of each square mile, scanning for disturbed vegetation or shreds of clothing, anything that looks off or out of place. Some of the dogs will be search-and-rescue animals focused on Cameron’s scent from a sweatshirt or pillowcase, something she’s used often. Others will be cadaver dogs, trained to detect traces of human decomposition, a scent picture rising from the soil or hanging on the air.

  In a case like this, when someone has simply vanished, the odds—at least at first—are just as likely that they’ll turn up unharmed. It’s possible Cameron has gotten lost in the woods somewhere, or that she’s chosen to run.